


Brick

by LadyProto



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Backstory, Character Death, Character Development, Character Study, Cyborg Simmons, Cyborg!simmons, Drunk Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Grif died bro, Hurt/Comfort, I'll suck a dick for kudos, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Multi, Organ Failure, Other, Past grimmons implied, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad Ending, Self-Destruction, Sexual Dysfunction, Survivor Guilt, Trigger warning info in the summary just to be safe, abuse of dogtags, back story, best thing I've ever written, destruction of a CD Player, general sad themes, i seek validation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 22:34:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7592815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyProto/pseuds/LadyProto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Casualty Count: Simmons's humanity, Sister's sanity, 1 bottle of cheap whiskey and an antique CD player.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brick

**Author's Note:**

> This was a labor of love and I'm actually very proud of this. Lots of character development and PTSD. If you have any questions about trigger warnings, or request for content, you can ask me on my tumblr http://yourscientistfriend.tumblr.com
> 
> Also I threw an ill-timed reference to "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream" where I compare Caboose to Benny. 
> 
> Fight me.

It was a statement of finality, and one that Simmons hadn’t begun to accept. He repeated the mantra a thousand times in his own brain, trying to make the reality of it clearer, but the syllables just jumbled and lost their meaning in his sleep deprived brain. 

Grif was gone. Grif was dead. 

It still hadn’t begun to feel real, and it seemed the ultimate betrayal that grief was not the star in Simmons’s state of mind. More than anything he could feel the guilt curl heavy and tight in his stomach, trying to burrow out of his gut in some form of self-destruction. He hadn’t ate. He hadn’t slept. The heavy, stinging self-condemnations made every breath from his mechanical lungs seem like something he didn’t deserve. 

Simmons felt the depression weigh him down with lead bones as he stumbled his way into Grif’s old room with weary, halting steps. It had been 24 hours since the funeral, and 72 since the death. Simmons counted the hours like sheep that would have ushered in the rest that had eluded him. There was a jagged wound on his heart, but one that he would not let himself explore, and instead filled up with the sensation of his world growing a little smaller, a little darker, and a little less worth living in. 

Of all the barracks, Grif’s room had always been the most barren. Care packages -- if there had been any -- had been sparse. The messy cot had only regulation red itchy blankets and a flat, poly-fiber filled pillow. In life, it had seemed like Grif's laziness. In death, it all just seemed wistful towards something that Grif could never quite attain. Simmons settled into Grif's unmade cot, leaning his head back on the cool concrete wall that enclosed the space. As much as Grif's laziness had been an annoyance in life, in death it was a messy comfort to those that remained. 

No one was impervious to death here. The young, the old, the important and the loved -- they all could die. It was the one truth that stood like the immovable object against the unstoppable force that was the ticking of time. The sun never set, the fields never grew, and the rich and poor alike became equal enough to fear death. Out here boys died. Either they became men or died from a frag grenade to the chest. Simmons and Grif had come into the army together as chubby-faced kids with wide eyes, squishy bodies and heads full of dreams that had to be put on backorder. Grif had had scruffy hair. Simmons had had foolish eyes, and even though their bodies had twisted and mutated into adulthood, one truth remained: out here the good guys died.

Grif had not met an honorable death. It wasn't battle that had killed Grif. It was Simmons. Simmons had killed Grif. Or rather his body had. Organ rejection was written down in red ink on the death certificate. They had thought to prevent it of course, some type of pill that would have slowed the process down. Maybe he needed another kind? Maybe it wasn't enough? The fact remained that no one had bothered to question the flu-like symptoms and jaundiced eyes until it was too late, and a swollen, painful Grif was puking up bloody mucus and picked at bats that didn't exist. 

The heart monitor had screeched and Sister had screamed. Sarge had stayed un-characteristically silent. Donut had clenched his chest and covered his mouth in shock. The crash cart nurses had pretended to work, knowing there was nothing that could have been done for someone so far gone. And so ashes had went back into ashes, and dust had went back into dust. No amount of hail-Mary’s and motivational speeches to the sky could bring Grif back now. Grif had been laid to rest with a face that wasn't his, on a planet he didn't know. Grif had been 22. He had died holding Simmons hand. 

Grif’s old dog tags weighed heavily in Simmons’s pants pockets, anchoring Simmons to the ground like lead and pulling him out of depersonalization. Simmons gently ran the pad of his original, human thumb over the imprinted letters of the dog tags. He tried to identify the letters like Braille, but the middle letters were worn, and the edges battered from their short, rough life. He had taken them from Grif’s body before they lowered the casket, and Simmons felt achingly disgusting holding the metal in between his fingers for reasons he could not decipher. It just seemed like something he shouldn’t have-- a reminder of a crime where the transgression was also the blessing. 

Simmons pooled the stainless steel chain into his metal hand. He felt nothing. And why should he? It was a crude replacement for his humanity, an Endoskeleton that chopped up his form with geometric edges bursting forth from organic bone, only to create a sink hole as muscles atrophied where machines prevailed. His left side was machine. And most times, nothing in his right side felt human any more either.

The war's effects were written on his body, both the metal and flesh parts alike. His fingers found the dent where his heart should be. A 7.62×51mm NATO had pierced through his armor, denting the steel that acted as his rib cage. Grif had been the one to help pull out the dent, using a shrapnel retrieval magnet and a hell of a lot of whiskey. Grif said he'd finish the job later, but later never came.

There had been no goodbyes and no closure.

"Hey, Dick."

And like a child discovering how a hot stove feels, he impulsively clenched his fist closed, pulling the dog tags back into the protection of his palm. His motions had not been subtle, but a reflex of someone caught in the midst of pain on raw nerves. He looked up with a purposely blank face, hiding embarrassment and grief behind ambiguity. 

It was Sister. Grif's sister to be exact. And much like Simmons, she hid any emotions behind a cracking facade and in her case, heavily smeared eyeliner. She'd changed clothes since the funeral, but the rest of her remained in post-internment purgatory. Her makeup had faded and smeared until only a ghost of color hid how truly gray and tired she was. Her hair fell loosely woven into the same braid as before. She looked smaller, as hollow and delicate and somber as bird bones. 

"Kai. I-" he tumbled over his words, rising to his feet in an ingrained show of respect, but his heart stayed low to the dirty floor in depression. "Are you okay? What are you doing here?" 

"I came to collect his things..." She trailed off. She never broke her eye contact, weakly using his gaze as an excuse to not face the cold finality of Grif's empty room alone. "The old man said it was only right that the next of kin pay their respects to a fallen soldier. He used to term respect and soldier loosely." She rubbed her arm awkwardly, her knotted eyebrows stretching the skin around her eyes so that her dark circles mirrored his own. 

His eyes timidly searched her gaze for some type of recognition -- some type of shared pain -- and he found it festering like an open wound. Her bright brown eyes had a shadow over them, and he could see that Blue Base, like his own Red, had had its own haunting set of restless footsteps and ghostly wails in its concrete walls last night. He wondered what Church would have done. Caboose. Tucker even. Because what do you do when something like this happens? The Grif siblings hadn’t wanted to be separated on opposite sides of the foxholes. Technically there had been an uneasy truce for a while now, and in a strange way this death had caused the rules to relax even further -- something that Grif would have enjoyed in life. 

Despite the horrible situation and agonizing over thinking, Simmons let a sad half smile come to his face. Even if the two of them had lost someone dear, at least they could hold on to the unwavering cynicism of their companions. "Yeah. I can see him saying that". He broke the eye contact first, squeezing the dog tags into his human hand and trying to discreetly slip it into his pants pockets. 

As he spoke, Sister stepped away from him and to the middle of the barren room. The concrete walls kept the air cold, stark and lonely. Even without the oppression, the room didn't offer many personal effects to counteract the bleakness. The only furniture in the room was a metal, regulation issued cot and metal frame side table. The only thing of personal value was an old raw wooden steamer trunk in the far side of the room. "So this is it, huh? This is where he's been for the last four years."

Simmons awkwardly shifted his weight from foot to foot behind her, uncomfortably acknowledging the emptiness that had been Grif's life. War was always hell, but for Grif it had to have been a personal torment. Grif's sister would have been merely 14 when he had been drafted, and the image played in Simmons's mind of a smaller, more vulnerable Kaikaina counting up the days from her brother's deployment with a pink glitter pen and cheap tourist calendar. How mentally agonizing had it been to tick off the weeks and months and years? How lonely and in pain did she have to be to pass the time lying under men decades older than her?

Simmons tried to imagine because he didn't know. He had nothing on Earth to go back to besides the two faded flowerless gravestones of his parents and a deserted, loveless shell of a house that had been left to collect dust and cobwebs. His only memories of his family was of his mother crying and his father berating him. At best Simmons had been locked in a closet, and at worse his childish face meeting with bony knuckles. Having something to lose had to hurt worse than never having anything at all.

Sister went on her knees, running blue acrylic nails along Grif’s storage trunk. It wasn't a nice antique with a family history, but a flea market box made from unfinished wood and raw metal hinges. She hesitated, looking like she was entertaining some fanciful idea that if she waited long enough, her brother would come barreling through the door, call her names, and chase her out for touching his stuff. It never happened of course, and she was forced to face reality with resigned shaky breath. She opened the trunk and the unpolished metal screeched as the trunk offered up the only personal possessions Grif had kept.

Simmons stepped over beside her without the invitation, staying tall and strong until the sweet smell of nostalgia washed over him like the violent storm. It was sweet summered grass, clean sweat and the tinge of smoke. Earthy, rich, unique and full of personality. It smelled so much like Grif that Simmons had to bite his lip to feel another form of pain. He blanked out, going into quiet observation and trying so, so hard to not feel, or remember how Grif twitched his eyebrow before he gave a sarcastic comment, or the way Grif’s dimples could light up the room, or the way….

Grif.

A pile of clean t-shirts lay unfolded at the top of the trunk, most in regulation red, but a few with personal touches. There was high school mascot on one, a few sarcastic phrases on the others. Sister picked up the first regulation red shirt and cradled it against her cheek. If there were tears, Simmons couldn't seem them, but she held the top to her face with shaking hands. She closed her eyes and just sat back on her heels, smelling and remembering. “I need this," she whined. Her voice shook, as she wrapped her arms around herself and pulled off her shirt with no hesitation. She had done this before and her brother was no longer here to screech at her about self respect and embarrassing the family.

In another time, in another place, it would have been like a bad summer teen movie. His best friend’s younger sister had gotten undressed in front of him, and it made him feel hot, queasy and terrified on a level he was not proud of and really, really didn’t want to examine. “Shit. warn someone next time,” The atmosphere had seemed too sacred to break with words and the loudness of his own voice startled him. He turned his head out of programmed respect. 

When he turned back, she had slipped on one of Grif's large, loose army shirts and cradled herself her in the well-worn material. She was still hugging herself, using the draping fabric to barely hold her battered soul together. Simmons hadn't move, staying on his feet in front of her kneeling and watched in understanding silence as she rode out another wave of grief. "You don't have to be here," she reminded him, and very quietly added "but I think we'd both want you to be."

Simmons had no comfort to give, and his heart tried to conjure forth some form of generalized sympathy even though his soul felt like a broken machine that tried to break out of its blue screen to give one last whirr into operation. Every kind word he tried to muster, every fake smile -- it was taxing, summoning responses from a pool of emotions that Simmons had not yet begun to process. He was tired. He was drowning. And she was a brick.

But still he would stay. They were both alike in loss after all; Both in pain. A piece of them had been ripped away, leaving them cold, confused and unable to stay afloat as life went on around them. Her words had stated all Simmons needed to know; the confirmation that she and Grif both needed him in this moment. If Simmons could relive the moment, he would gladly take the painful death in place of Grif, but it didn’t matter now. Grif was dead, and his bones lay eroding under the prairie dust of some alien moon.

Kaikaina continued her painful journey shifting through the old wooden trunk. Her lips flattened into a ruby-red frown. Simmons didn’t know how to comfort Sister, but he would bow to her whims and take her lead even though emotional exhaustion screamed his name so loudly it echoed in his skull. 

Grif would have done the same for Sister.

"Oh my god," she gave a ragged breath that clenched in her throat. Simmons could almost taste the dust and emptiness in her mouth.

He dropped to one knee beside her, close enough to see one stray tear at the corner of her eye. He could have touched her. He could have put his hand on her shoulder, or pulled her closer for support. But he didn't . This was her moment, and he was an outsider. She was alone and he was alone, even though their bodies were less than a foot apart. "Are you okay?"

She held a tacky, sea shell and Popsicle stick picture frame out to Simmons. The picture had been through a lot by the looks of it. One wooden stick had broken towards the edge, and dangling strings of glue that had been too weak to keep their shells danced around like ectoplasm. It was a child's old art project, now decrepit with age and rough handling. "It's me," the air in Sister's throat escaped in a low whine like a balloon that had been pricked and deflated.

Simmons had never seen the picture before. It was of Grif and Kaikaina, standing on a white sandy beach in some faraway place. It was before the war, and before sadness. Grif stood with his big bear arms around his sister as she playfully kissed his cheek. They had matching poufy ponytails and cheesy gap-toothed grins. Their happiness seemed haunting now, taunting them of the fact that they could never go back to childish smiles and blue oceans of yesteryear.

So that was Grif's prized possession. Under piles of sarcastic t-shirts and snack-cake wrappers was a hidden picture of a goofy, chubby little boy and his baby sister, enjoying a moment of respite on some remote corner of earth. This was the Grif only Sister knew, and only Sister could miss. And something in Simmons hated that. 

Simmons had been literally a part of Grif, and Simmons had to swallow his pride This was not a contest of pain. This wasn't some weird marathon of who loved Grif more. Simmons shrugged his shoulders and carefully reached his robot hand towards Sister’s shoulders in a show of solidarity, but paused at the last moment, unable to judge how to make the contact seem like he wasn't invading her space. 

She would have avoided the sympathetic touch anyway, as she ducked again to dig into the next forgotten corner of the trunk. Old, thinning letters written with notebook paper and glitter pen were neatly folded in a pile. Grif had been the kind of guy to turn in official paper work with Cheeto dusted finger prints, and the neat appearance of the childish, years old letters were oddly well-kept and well-loved, even if their juxtaposed proximity to an ancient CD player and mostly full bottle of cheap whiskey claimed otherwise. 

Sister turned her head away from the folded paper, pointedly rejecting another round of heartbroken nostalgia and instead made grabbing motions towards the bottle. "Ah. Booze!" She seemed to perk up at that fact, which left Simmons reeling at her change in mood. 

Maybe he'd given her too much credit. Maybe he'd projected his own sadness on to her. Her breaking voice and blotchy, dark eyes were reminiscent of how Simmons's mother would look after his father's weekends of binge drinking -- so why then did Sister seem so eager to swing the alcohol bottle next to her full hips as she searched for a spot to place the music player? She bent at the waist to close Grif's trunk, making no attempt to disguise her motions as she reintroduced Simmons to just how short her shorts were.

"Kaikunāne had this in high school," She mused, using her blue acrylic nails to press the play button. The song starts in the middle, just another thing Grif had left behind, another piece of unfinished business in the form of a half heard song. It's some sad ballad played on piano and a six string as a haunted voice sang about drowning and going nowhere. 

It's hard to see her as a grieving sister now. She circled her hips to a song that was clearly not made for dancing. It was a gravely voiced singer with too many words and nowhere to keep them. It was a song full of regrets and bad spur-of-the-moment decisions that lead to a life time of regret. But she rhythmically swung her curvy body, tousling her hair like she was some super model at a photoshoot. It didn't even look right, just the oddly rehearsed moves of someone used to performing. 

The movements were overtly sexual, well rehearsed and ill timed. The blue team had once sent Grif a taunting letter that listed Sister's position as "team bicycle", because as they had so crudely stated, “they had all had a ride." It was vague enough in description to let Simmons's minds play through horridly dehumanizing scenarios that probably never happened. Grif had read the letter out loud to Simmons, growing in belligerency up to the point that it mentioned Caboose, at which point Grif's protective anger became mild irritation at the prospect of Caboose of all people knowing what to do with a woman. Simmons had made a show of laughing and agreeing with the absurdity, fighting down memories of the brutish Benny with a childlike lack of sanity and a propensity for sexual conquest from some long forgotten short story about screaming with no mouth. 

Simmons had read the letter, over and over again, confused and tormented. He had an innate need to protect women, but the reputation that had proceeded her seemed brazenly accurate. The vulgarity of her wriggling body, the disconcerting contrast of Technicolor finger nails with dirt from the last rites embedded in the cuticles -- it was unpleasant, uncomfortable and unlike anything he had ever known. He wasn't sure how to describe the feeling of angry betrayal sitting behind his metal rib cage.

She took a large swig, wrapping her lips around the bottle and lifting it towards the sky before giving an audible and unladylike gulp. This was the Sister that Tucker had wrote about. This was the uncaring, binge drinking, marathon fucking eighteen year old with an attitude problem. This was Grif's mirror image, the hyperactivity to his laziness, the sexuality to his apathy, the one that had caved while Grif had became her shelter. Sister held out the bottle to Simmons, playfully beckoning to him with her slim, tanned fingers. 

Angry nausea coiled in the pit of his stomach. He crossed his arms and turned his head away, making a show of displaying his glowing, robotic eye and scarred puckered lips. "No thanks", he hissed. Irritation manifested clearer than before. She took another large swig -- downing at least six ounces in the last 30 mins -- and smiled coyly at him. Red light from his eye washed her face into a mysterious caricature, twisting out the emotion that was obvious in the normal light like water ringing from a towel. She looked up at him through thick eyelashes, and the vibrant color of her eyes and been bleached into flat, unfeeling circles. He felt that if his eye were to short circuit, she would turn into even less of a human figure, some type of barely moving over-sexualized doll in the flashing rave-like light show. Malaise and animosity clung to his body like vines on brick, weakening his integrity 

"Come on, Dick, don't you wanna-" she started to whine.

"No!" He barked. The coil of frustration in his stomach snapped, and the dam burst forth with regretful words, blind anger, and a roaring shout. "No I fucking don't!! Why the fuck are you here?" 

"H-huh?" She didn't recoil, even as he packed his tall patchwork body closer into her space. She seemed disoriented, glassy-eyed with confusion, not able to process just how dancing to music about death and loss the day after her brother’s funeral was somehow inappropriate. 

"He's dead! Don't you get it? Why the fuck are you laughing like some giggly bitch?" He grabbed her wrist, the spindly digits of his left hand enveloped her jutting wrist in strength he wished he didn't have. For a moment he was that nerdy kid with thick glasses and a unruly head of hair, living out the fantasy of lashing back at those that verbally abused him. He yelled for every time he had been told to keep quiet as a child, for every time he was told to be seen and not heard, and every time his father locked in him the closet for speaking too loudly during soccer games. He was yelling because dammit it all to sweet alien hell and back, he had loved Grif more than anything in the world. Dexter Grif had been Simmons best friend, and no one should disrespect Grif's death, and definitely not before the dirt on the grave had even settled. 

His human hand squeezed the dog tags inside of his pocket, wishing that the edges were sharp enough to slice through his palm. Blood never came, so he looked to draw it from elsewhere. "He's dead. D-e-a-d. Does spelling it out get it through your fucking skull?"

Her tone was strong and even. She shrieked back with the solidity of someone who is used to holding her own against shouting men. She stood forlorn and detached from everything else in Grif's gray, plain room. The pop of color in her yellow shorts and floral tattoos stood out against the bleak concrete. Isolated tears rolled down her cheeks, but she met his stubborn stare. She was a trembling monument to the remnants of the Grif family that had been left behind, and Simmons couldn’t stop himself from yelling at her. "Because I'm about five minutes away from putting Dex's pistol in my mouth and saying fuck this bullshit war!"

She jerked her hand away from him, and he let go easily as his fingers slackened in shock. He turned his other eye towards her, reminding himself of both of their humanities. There's a heavy silence of raw emotion as she looked up at him with large, shining eyes. The sickening feeling began again, the uneasiness of the situation and what he'd done weighed on him. The little boy in his stunted soul wanted to run away, to hide his face and deny the flash of anger that had just wracked the room. He wanted to compartmentalize his outburst as another raw shamefully emotional moment that he didn't have the energy or maturity to handle, just like he had filed away his own dismemberment and the nightmarish left-over’s from his father's drunken rages. He wanted to say he was sorry. He wanted to hug her to comfort both himself and her. Why was it so much easier to get angry than it was to properly grieve? "Oh shit. I’m sorry. That was callous of me. He was your brother."

His apology came too late for her emotional well-being. She hid her face in the crook of her arm like children do when they've hurt themselves on the playground. It did nothing to hide her obvious, ragged sobs. Her tears sounded painful, as her back shuddered and she tried to catch her breath. It's the cry of a little girl, left alone in a dark house one too many times. It was the cry of a younger sister watching her brother leave for a war she doesn't understand, and it's the cry of a grieving teenager alone in a scary world. "But stupid Dex, even though he's dead, he's watching out for me. There wasn't any bullets." She trembled to herself a little more, booze and sadness tiring her out as she sank into her brother's messy cot. 

"Fuck, Sis, I'm so sorry." Her small whimpers stirred his emotions into even more chaos in the pit of his stomach. He hated to see women cry, and he hated that he felt too small and insignificant to do anything about her pain. His body slackened with her, as he shook off the last remnants of his passionate outburst, and sat next to her on the bed. He was tired, and his hand relaxed from its vice grip on the illicit dog tags in his pocket. His hand throbbed from the release, skin inflamed in protest where engraved letters had crushed against malleable skin. Grif's name was imprinted on Simmons's red, throbbing palm, and Simmons liked it that way,. "Hey... Hey now…," he tried to lower his voice into a comforting hushed tone. "I'm so sorry. I miss him too. I lost my temper there." 

Simmons didn't touch her, afraid that she would tense away from him. He would have deserved it after his tantrum. "I have something Grif would want you to have." With a shaky sigh and heavy heart, he made the largest sacrifice he could have made -- even more painful and terrifying than giving half his body to Grif. He slowly caressed the dog tags one last time, and his soul shredded itself with grief as he dipped his hand into his pocket. He pressed his fingers into the metal again. Dexter Grif. Red Army. Private. Simmons kissed the metal lightly, closing his eyes tightly against tears he would not let come, and tightening his jaw to stop the trembling. He pressed the metal tags against his cheek, wishing he had enough time to let Grif's name imprint there too. 

Simmons gathered the chain into his hand and pushed the tags out to Kaikaina. With every centimeter he pushed the tags away from him, he felt the still weeping wounds in his heart swell more with pain. It felt like watching Grif die again, watching with passive helplessness as the heart monitor flat-lined so loudly it rang in his ears. It hurt like being dismembered again, when his original eye had been sliced through to the optic nerve, but he still had enough sight in the other eye to see his own bones splintered and detached. It was like living through last night all over again, being the second person to place the hand full of dirt on Grif's grave. Sister had been first then, and Sister should be first now. 

It took her a moment to recognize the tags, but when she did her face contorts into the first smile he has seen on her face in days. "Oh! Oh! Thank you!" She doubled the chain around her wrist, making a loose bracelet that clattered with her movements. "I needed this! I need him!"

She leaned into Simmons's metal side, clearly too tipsy to anticipate how his body would no longer give and shift to accommodate physical contact. He didn't move. His enhancements were crude at best, and the only polishing his jointed mechanical skeleton had received was being beat up through life and war. Jagged metal edges jeopardized the soft skin of her face, and creaky exposed joints threatened to pinch and tear at her limbs. He was not comfortable person to touch.

He wasn't an easy person to look at either. For all the metal parts he had, he had the scars and sutured lacerations to show how they came to be. His left arm was machine, but his left shoulder socket was human. They met in a collision of terrifying angles and haunted memories of rain-storm like down pours of his own blood. Even his insides hadn’t been spared, and every artificial breath he took threatened flashbacks to the horrors of punctured lungs; the gasping, horrid moments he felt himself dying, felt himself loosing grip on reality as his lungs refused to hold air. 

Simmons found himself reaching for the bottle in Sister's lap.

"Here, have a drink," she twisted open the dented aluminum seal of the bottle. It was cheap, barely a step above the plastic flask with bottom-of-the-barrel booze. He sniffed it. It was strong. He raised the bottle to the sky, chugging as much as he could get down. He gagged at the taste, and a sweet burn threatened to send the whiskey back up. He hadn't ate much in two days, so his stomach accepted the fermented grain with burning hatred.

"Pussy,” Sister purred.

Simmons sputtered again. This wasn’t the kind of thing that was brewed for flavor, but rather to wash out the bitter taste of regret. It was warm, and falsely comforting, like a prostitute that made the nights less lonely but the mornings more sorrowful. “Stupid fucker said he didn't have any alcohol when I asked last week."

"Should have known better. He's been drinking since he's been like, what, 16?" Sister was drunk enough to forget to use past tense in relation to her brother’s life. Simmons wasn't going to be the one to correct her grammatical tense at that statement. Speaking about Grif in “had beens” and “could haves” was going to cut like a knife. 

"Yeah, I think I tried my dad's beer at seventeen? I think? I started drinking more when we--" Simmons trailed off with a spacey, vacant-eyed stare. _We started seeing our people die,_ He wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut, instead letting Sister keep only the pleasant memories of her brother. 

Unlike Simmons who drank to dull the memories of being ripped to shreds, and the agonizing realty of seeing his friends slowly become more and more mentally and emotionally damaged, Grif drank to feel that horror again. Grif could only express drunk what he felt sober, so he took to drinking, letting his emotions come to a crescendo and releasing them cathartically in a moment of screaming, broken knuckles and several wrecked Warthogs. Drinking with Grif had been an adventure of self-destruction and painfully candid emotions. 

Simmons took another swig, the heat building in his belly. He was several shots in, trying to stop himself from the inevitable over-analysis of Grif’s bare-faced behavior. But every nuance of action, from the way Grif had squinted when he spoke to way Grif had tried to hide his dimples with his hands when he smiled was amplified in Sister. She was the strange doppelganger of Grif, just different enough to be her own person, but identical enough that her dimpled smile set another fire to Simmons’s raw regret. “Beer? That's not alcohol, " Sister scoffed, "We've been sneaking carnival beer since we were 10? 11?"

Simmons sat close to her, curvy hip pressed against boxy metal joints, as he watched Kaikaina taken on her brother’s legacy of self-destruction and using alcohol as excuse to come to her own climax of tactless, inappropriately displayed grief. "Who let you steal drinks at 10?"

"Who was going to stop me?"

Simmons didn't know if he should take that as a show of defiance, or a call for help from a childhood of neglect. He looked over to her as she snuggled further into the bed with long lean legs curled up to her chest. He let her stay there, using him for the support she desperately needed. They don't speak, and whatever she was thinking about left her with a vacant stare and large blurry eyes. She balled up on the cot, holding the whiskey like it’s her brother’s dearest memory. 

Simmons was feeling the alcohol too, but didn't voice it. The outside world was starting to disappear into inconsequential background noise, and his eyes blurred when he blinked. He was finally breaking into his respite from the cutting reality of sobriety as they sat warm with booze and emotion, surrounded by the memories of one they had loved so dearly. 

"Christ, your hand is cold." She observed his robotic hand with child-like wonder. She scooted onto his left knee, eyes shining with curiosity and lack of inhibition. "Can you feel this?"

And as quickly as the comfort had come, it had gone. His half metal body was the elephant in every room Simmons dared to enter. Sister touched on his ball-style finger joints and each blunted sensation triggered a knife-like flash in his head. There wasn’t enough alcohol on the entire planet to dull the flashes of memory. She ran her fingers down the twin metal rods of his forearm, and in his head he saw the ruby red drops flying like rain from the heavens. She fixated on his long, gunmetal phalanges, and he relived seeing his human arm detached and literally yards away from the bloody, raw stump of his shoulder socket. She manually bent and twisted his joints comparing them to her own hand. Simmons mentally replayed Grif smashing a mirror at the first sight of his Hawaiian tanned skin botched together with Irish pallor. 

"Sort of." Simmons passively let her take his hand. Simmons took another shot of whiskey to dull the sensations. He would let her manipulate his body as long as she needed to keep her calm and happy. "I can feel the spatial recognition more than the tactile sensation,"

"But you can feel me,” Sister pulled Simmons’s metal hand through the loop of the chain with hers. Grif’s dog tags lay in between soft humanity and post-war tragedy. She used the statement to transition in perfectly, leaning in for a drunken, sloppy kiss. The smooth skin of her face rubbed against the scratched metal of his cyborg eye, and a few of her stray over-bleached hairs catch in the metal joints. He heard them pop out of her scalp and break as she adjusted herself against him. 

She moved her full lips on his, smearing the remaining color onto his face. The pigment made his scars look red and fresh. He didn't push her away, not out of desire but out of guilt, regret and confusion. The left side of his mouth was too puckered and scarred to move in rhythm with her. He knew what she wanted, and he also knew he couldn't satisfy her.

"You're drunk," he reminded her, unable to form the words to explain just how fucked up the situation was. The person dearest to them was dead. A moment ago, Simmons had been verbally abusing Sister to the point of tears. And now she wanted to fuck? He didn’t understand. Sex and raw heartache were somehow intertwined in Sister. Somewhere along the way the wires in her head had crossed.

She straddled him, placing curved muscled thighs on either side of his hips. “So are you," she argued, beginning to trail wet, ripe kisses down his neck. His human hand lay limply to his side, not touching her, not encouraging her. He twisted metal fingers back through Grif’s dog tags delicately so not to bruise her knuckles in the joints.

"I never got use to Dex having that side of his face gone." She touched the corner of where metal met skin. More emotional abuse and sex. More twisted wires. The dog tags around her wrist bounced against the metal of Simmons's face. He could see the name, see the dents, see the aged burn marks illuminated in red from his robotic eye. Dexter Grif. Private. Red Army. The memories were there again, and they haunted him with ghostly flashes of Grif's last moments. The sound of the heart monitor flat lining, Sarge slamming the door in frustration, that last dimpled smile and the feigned diligence of crash cart nurses that could never grasp just how important their patient was to those around them. 

Simmons grimaced, too drunk and tired to take the emotional wounds any longer. He was alone in pain and just tired. All he wanted was for her to stop talking about Grif, to stop existing as the reminder that Grif was dead. She was the brick and he was drowning slowly. 

Simmons bucked his hips and she gasped pleasantly in response, even though the purpose was to flip her off of him. He pinned her, more roughly than intended. She sprawled out underneath him with overtly-sexual submission, eyes lidded and shiny with ill timed lust, recently dried tears, and way too much alcohol. 

Simmons hovered over top of her, trying to keep his spine up and away from her, unwilling to be the next notch in her belt and the continuation of her self-destruction. Emotional trauma and sex clouded over her aura like smog, and as Simmons held her down; his robotic eye washed her in pale red light. She looked fake, almost like a doll. Between her fading makeup and fading sobriety it was hard to tell where Kaikaina, the lonely Grif sibling ended and Sister, the military fuckmeat began. “Why-?" He tried to form the words, but the sudden change in position sent the alcohol flooding to his head. 

“Drinking isn’t the only thing Grif and I started young,” she purred, and the implication of it caused repulsion to build up in his stomach. 

"Oh god." He felt his lips part and jaw loosen in realization of what she had said. He quickly let her go, standing up on his knees and scrambling to back away. 

"No, not, ugh, come back" she whined obnoxiously, locking her hips around him -- a reminder of how capable a soldier she really was. She sat up with him, legs tangled with his own and the smell of booze heavy in the air. He studied her eyes. She wanted this. She wanted him to push back, wanted him to hurt her. He could read it in the golden specks of her eyes. But he couldn't do that. He couldn't save her. He was a weak, tiny, red-headed kid that got made fun of for freckles and liking math and he was tired. She lowered the hand with the dog tags to his chest, and they fluttered against where his heart should be and landed in the indentation that Grif never had the chance to buff out. His mind was too whiplashed to follow her mood swings, his heart too broken to care, and his body too metal, uncomfortable and foreign for him to enjoy it. 

“You were closer to him than anyone. I just wanted to be close to him too,"

Disgusting implications hit his stomach and melded with the alcohol to form a sort of self-mutilating poison. Simmons was able to get a good grip in her hair. Her hair was tightly coiled, much like her brother's, and he raked his hand through the texture. His fingers lost in the poof of curls. "Please just shut up." 

He kissed her desperately, skulls knocking against each other as she wrapped her finger tips in his red hair. They were already emotionally bare, if it took a few moments and a few less clothes for their mental states to heal, he was ready for anything. Hell was supposed to be filled with the gnashing of teeth as the damned chewed their own digits to feel another kind of pain. War was filled with fucking so that soldiers could feel something, anything at all. Why was it so easy to say "fuck me" but so hard to say "hold me?" 

He gently placed his palms a little above her knees, softly feeling her silky skin against his finger tips. He hesitated, allowing metal fingers to make contact. He hadn't had sex since the accident. He hid in his helmet most the time, afraid to show just how much of a patch-work monster he had become, but as she yanked off his t-shirt, he was forced to consider how this may be awkward for the both of them. His lower half was still mostly organic, but so many nerves had been cut and rearranged that he couldn't guarantee this would come to the conclusion they both needed. 

She straddled him, grinding heavily into him, her body naked except for Grif’s oversized t-shirt. She threw back another swig of cheap whiskey before going in for a kiss. Their lips never met this time and suddenly she sat back on her heels, putting as much empty air between them without actually moving her hips from his. Her eyes were blurry and unfocused . He had never been more aware of the implications of having sex with a drunken, grieving mess. "Wait, have you ever?" She questioned.

Simmons propped himself on his elbows and raised his chest to close the gap between them again. He had nothing to say. She was in control. She was intent on fucking away her feelings, and like every other time in his life, Simmons went through the scene with passivity and detached calculations of the scene. His reality felt like it had already crumbled. All that existed now was her on him and the cruel irony that Simmons had to be the one left alive.

She took his silence as denial. "Then no, I don't want your first time to be like this too."

"No. It's not." He answered her truthfully, pulling her warmth back down to him. If she moved, he would float away. ”There was a girl. In high school." A girl, in college and a guy in the army too but he didn't add that part. 

Sister took that as consent, and leaned down to kiss him, releasing a cascade of curls into his face, She smelled like the softer, gentler version of her brother. Less like smoke, and more like that sweet, white sand of some forgotten shore. He could feel her warmth, but his cock barely twitched in response. He hid a hiss of frustration at how close her heat was, and how fever-hot she felt, but how little his body reacted. Maybe if she’d move enough he could get his pants off, maybe things would be different. 

But nothing was different. Whiskey, trauma and nerve damage wrapped around his hips like thick barbed ropes, pressing his head under the waves of an over-working mind and under-working body. Up until this point he had been able to pretend that he was still human, still Dick Simmons the nerdy kid enlisting into the army as a cowardly method of self harm. But as her soft hands met limp ineffectuality, he felt his face being pushed to the proverbial mirror and he went wide-eyed with horror at the sight. He would never have control over his body, his mind, his life. This was it. This was who he was. His mind zoomed into the uncertain future, and he could see himself growing lonely, cold and aged before his time from his fragile psyche. He could never return to civilian life. He had no family to return to and no living friends remaining.His sins were written on his skin in raised, collagen filled scars and phantom pains from limbs that had long since rotted away.

Sister was what was real now and Simmons blinked away the intoxication in his eyes to focus on her realness. She moved her body towards his legs, and her weight kept him stationed in reality. She was real. He was real, and as her head ducked in between his legs he realized they were reaffirming the basic parts of their individual humanities. He was submitting to another’s will and she was using her body to manipulate others around her. It was all they knew how to do and it was comforting in a twisted sense. Simmons now understood why Sister wanted to clear her mind with sex, alcohol, drugs and violence. Only the most extreme treatments could anesthetize extreme pain.

Simmons studied how the strands in her hair tangled and weaved into each other in her day-old braid. Sister didn’t seem to care, instead focusing on silencing whatever emotions were in her own head by choking them out of her throat on his half-hard cock. She arched over his thighs like a ghost. The dog tags around her wrists pressed cold metal into his human thigh that juxtaposed against the hot slick spit she trailed from the head of his cock. She looked up at him with eager eyes, hungry for validation. “Tell me I’m good at this,” She whispered against him. Her tongue played over sweaty skin. He imagined how wet and steamy she would have felt without damaged nerves. She suctioned her lips tighter, rolling her head from side to side to keep the eye contact, looking for the praise from Simmons because her normal pillar of emotional support was already decaying in his grave.

All Simmons could hear was his own voice echoing back years ago: _Tell me I’m worth something. Tell me that I’m good for something. Tell me that my existence isn’t a waste of oxygen._

He tried to whisper generic words of comfort to Sister, but they catch thick and heavy in his throat. She’d drug all the blood to the back of his brain like a bullet through the skull, and his body finally reacted. He can’t help but feel the hot shame penetrate in his chest like her nails into his skin of his hips. It almost hurt, a hurt he accepted with open arms as it stirred his body and mind into life. It was a pain he deserved, and he now understood her crossed wires.

She sighed pleasantly at her success. Simmons could feel her relief draining out of her and through the curves of her waist. He can picture it pooling black and rancid into his own heavy body even as Sister crawled lithely over him like a cat. She still had Grif’s dog tags looped around her wrist. Each playful motion forward drug the tags over Simmons’s patch-work skin.

His cock twitched as she came closer. He had more feeling from the waist up, and he felt her hands pressing into his chest and scrapping over his nipples. She planted poisoned kisses that pressed into his body, weighing him down with sadness and guilt. The bleach blonde of her hair faded into the jaundiced skin in his head. She leaked out self destruction on his stomach.

She mounted him easily, gasping the intrusion even though she was the one who had started the motion. She bottomed out against her cervix. The thudding collision had him ram against something soft and fleshy that he couldn’t describe. She arched so far that she nearly doubled backwards. She should have been in pain -- maybe she was? -- She put her forearm against her lower stomach and let out a mew of pleasure that was obviously rehearsed. She was no doubt stroking his ego, putting on a face of desire even though she had just hurt herself. “Did I- shit, sorry, let’s sto-”

She put one hand on his chest to quell his concern, and with the other braced herself against the concrete wall. Simmons didn’t even question her response any longer, shamefully becoming one with her erratic mental state. He played the part she wanted and he clawed at her hips, her ass, her thighs; grinding into her despite feeling next to nothing. He made needy, grasping motions at her body in an attempt to nurture the small sensation steadily building in his hips and smother out the flashbacks. His hands desperately reached for any part of her he could find, trying to keep his mind on what was tangible, real and alive. And right now that was her and the dull thud of her full weight on his metal hip.

Her fluorescent acrylic nails dug into him, bringing blood to his human side, and roughing up the metal side with just another set of dull, shallow divots from everyday wear and tear. Simmons arched into a groan at the pain. She responded by thrusting him into herself with quick short strokes. She was Icarus, the girl who flew too high and too fast. Her waxen wings became the latex that she always seemed to forget in favor of self-destruction. Sister reached needily for Simmons hands, once against seeking support in his un-working body. He helped her move, timidly lacing his hand into the loops of Grif’s dog tags where they entangled themselves in their one commonality.

It took longer than he'd like to admit before he felt any pleasure, but this wasn't about pleasure. Their hands grasping at one another in the steel beaded chain of the dog tags reminded them of their mission. She was not gentle and the sound of skin on skin -- wet and obscene -- echoed through the base as she bounced on his lap. Each thrust sent the mattress crashing into the wall, bending unseen springs against the concrete. The metal army-issued bed frame groaned as it scrapped the wall. There was no talking, no playful banter, just the white noise of skin wriggling against skin and heavy breathing. He attempted to keep his head above the waves of intoxication and primal desire but she was holding him to the mattress and making him join her in mental extermination. Sarge could hear. Donut could hear. And Simmons hoped to whatever cruel god existed that his comrades were forced to listen to what this war had done to him.

He was dying. He was hurting.

She came first, but that was to be expected since her nerves were not jumbled and broken. Her orgasms were as crude, raw and violent as the implications of her past. She reached the apex of emotional catharsis with a high pitched cry. Depravity as raw as the pain in her head swirled around them as she brought Grif’s dog tags to her face, her teeth gnashed against the metal in order to keep her voice down. She bit down on her brother’s dog tags like they were a piece of iron comfort and life was going to come in with a crude saw and amputate parts of her humanity. She pressed the tops of her feet into Grif’s bed as she let out the last squeaks of her stifled moan. She shuddered over top of Simmons, trying to keep herself from sinking under the waves of guilty nostalgia, all the while digging her canines into the metal. “Please, please don’t leave me alone,” she whined, gasping desperately as she rode out the aftershocks of her orgasm. Her eyes were hazed with alcohol and lust.

Pain. Loss. Sex. They were all the same in her mind. Simmons could feel a slight tightening around him, but nothing as intense as he expected. If it wasn’t for the fact she rocked over him and chipped her teeth against Grif’s dog tags, Simmons wouldn’t have even known she came. His cock throbbed, but he never found himself closer to finishing. The need mounted but his broken body wouldn't allow him to get close. He was alive dammit. They were alive, and it was life’s cruelest irony to let him be the last one standing in a body that wouldn’t work, with a girl he couldn’t please, and the flashbacks of atrocities he couldn’t erase. He could feel her, but barely. He was alive, but barely.

He gripped at her hips harder than he intended. Whiskey and bitter non-fulfillment made him forget to watch his hand placements as he placed pink bruises on her hips with his finger joints. He held her steady on top of him and bucked to meet the cradle of her thighs. He let a low, primal growl, losing himself in frustrated incompetence of his injuries. For him to feel anything, he had to move fast and hard. He had to be in control, moving his body into her and not being the toy for her to use to fuck out her frustrations.

Her thighs collided down on him wetter than before. He was so fucking close. He bit his lip, focusing on cultivating the pressure building in his cock. But he did something wrong. Either he had thrust up into her too hard, or had pulled her down too forcefully. It didn’t matter. He felt the metal that encased where his hip should be slip and the flesh resistance from earlier gave away. He saw the past come to life again, haunting him in shades of red and black. He could see the blood on her bare thighs. His roughly squared hip had made a clean slice at her pelvis. Thin watery blood smeared across his hips.

“You -- oh god --” She stopped moving as his eyes went dark and blank. She seemed utterly disinterested in the fact she was injured. To her, it was probably no more than a bad paper cut. But to him, it was the clean slice of a trained soldier who had lost all ability to be human. He’d tried too hard, focused too much on himself and now another one of the Grif siblings had lost blood because of him.

Her blood covered him like a fungus, spreading slowly over his stomach and melting into the crevice where skin met metal. It slowly infested every piece of remaining humanity. He could feel it crawl up his neck. He relived the horror of punctured lungs as the spores of spiritual necrosis smothered out his breath.

“Are you okay? Simmons? Why did you stop?”

Sister’s voice brought him back to the present but it wasn’t enough to shake the flashbacks that gripped his mind like a vice. He withdrew from her, and for a second time he flipped her underneath him. Simmons studied her dimples. All he could see was Grif’s last moments, and the accident that set the wheels of death in motion. Simmons laid roughly on top of Sister, attempting to shield her with his broken body from some unseen horror that only existed in his head. He wished he could have done the same for Grif. Simmons tucked his naked body around Kaikaina and placed his head at her neck, shakily trying to feel her pulse through his cheek.

They were alive. Nothing had happened. The empty and cold concrete base circled around him. “I hurt you,” He gasped. “I hurt you.” The sudden change of positions made the alcohol flood to his head. He had to hold back the vomit from joining the imaged flood of blood around them.

Grif’s un-honorable death still played on loop in Simmons head. Her body blended into Grif’s cold stiff corpse and the bed merged into Grif’s casket. When Simmons finally opened his eyes to face Sister, she hid her concern with a purposely blank face as she offered him the only comfort she knew how to give. Her large brown eyes shine with tears and intoxication. "You can do it again. I deserve this."

“No. Fuck that!” He withdrew from her embrace, holding his hands up and away from her.

He scrambled to one end of the bed. This time Sister didn't follow after him. She sat up with him but kept her head down protecting her throat and chest instinctively even though she was not shy about being naked and freshly fucked. She rocked herself gently and held her swimming head in her arms. "I was just trying to help" she whined.

The blood clotted in between her thighs clearly marked where Simmons's had cut her. The ghost of purple bruises danced to the surface of her hip where he had pinched her in his exposed hand joints. "But, fuck, that's not how this is supposed to be," Simmons's voice started out as a whisper in their gray prison. Sister's face was shallow and pale as she looked up him with large dark eyes. “That's not how any of this supposed to be!" His voiced cracked and slurred at the same time, expelling a guttural mess of syllables. The words floated from his mouth and hung like a trivial forgotten birthday banner.

No words formed in his mouth but still he cried out again, if just to give the twisted thoughts in his head some other place to haunt. He would burst the ear drums of anyone who would be unfortunate enough to witness his breakdown - be it Sister, the Reds, the Blues, the damn walls, Grif's rotting corpse. Anyone. "I'm not going to hurt you! I'm so tired of hurting." It was his turn to cry now, the tears stagnated in his eyes instead of falling. He sobbed with an open mouth, letting the dust from the alien desert settle thick and gritty at the back of his throat. "I am so fucking tired of hurting people." His outburst bounced against the grayness, and the echoes reverberated and atrophy into stillness. Simmons could barely keep his muscles working. The steel in his body once again kept him from crumpling into the defeat he deserved. 

"It's not supposed to be this way! Its not-" He slouched down into the blankets, deflating like a balloon from his outburst. No one cared how it was supposed to be. 

Sister accepted his outburst like she'd accepted the punishments of every other soldier that used her body as a pit stop. "Fuck it," she slurred and she reached for the forgotten whiskey bottle that had gotten wedged between the wall and the cot.

Simmons captured her wrist for the second time that night. She leaned into the captivity. Her skin ripped against his steel finger tips bringing forth more blood from her body. His intention had been to save her, to prevent another round of mutually assured downfall but she once again used him for self harm. He snatched the bottle from her hand before she could get any more warm whiskey to her mouth and downed the remaining six ounces in heavy gulps before she could cause any more trouble for herself.

His stomach immediately regretted it. It felt as though the alcohol had shot straight to his head in protest. Chaotic memories swam in the alcohol, though only bits and pieces came through above the nausea. He felt his body being ripped apart from the inside out. Suddenly he was in Grif's place, back against the stiff hospital bed. His retinas burned from the fluorescent lightening and that fucking heart monitor kept beeping. He watched his friends hold each other and whisper false comfort to one another. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything to help. 

Simmons hurled the now empty bottle across the room, the cheap glass shattered against the concrete. Larger pieces clattered to the ground and rained like rubble against the forgotten CD player. The song skipped and distorted into mechanical cries before sputtering out. "Why did you do that?!?" She whined. She had to be black out drunk by now. Spatial recognition and balance were already gone when she reached out to him. She fell, landing heavily onto his human shoulder and weeping softly.

The room was silent again, and in that moment Simmons saw what they truly were. They were broken and damaged children with too many weapons and not enough sense. Sister and Simmons were pathetic remnants that had never had a chance to be anything other than the hostages of their predetermined fates. They been destroyed by life, wrecked by war, and left behind by those they loved to fend for themselves. They were both naked, trapped in their own erratic grief and they had tried so hard to use each other for comfort.

Simmons held her body trying to avoid looking at her texture hair, her dark skin, and those dimples that sent daggers through his heart. He laid her down on Grif's bed. Finally losing the weight of her on top of him felt like relief. He covered her with Grif's blankets and snuggled the dog tags into her hand. She closed her fingers around them protectively.

Simmons closed his eyes to the implications of what he had done, how Sister would have to face the morning alone. He put on his pants, and stole one last blurry look into the abandoned room. Grif was gone.

The blood of the covenant, the water of the womb -- it didn't matter which one was thicker because both he and Sister were going to drown. Simmons swallowed the nausea into his throat and made wobbly attempts to make it back to his room. He couldn't see straight, he couldn't walk straight. He found himself crawling with his belly on the floor like maggots on a fresh rotting corpse. Metal scraped against dirty concrete. Grief, insomnia, and booze pressed down on him like six feet of dirt. Simmons collapsed heavily in the hallway, and waited for his life to start its inevitable sad ending.


End file.
